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Abstract
While research on the lives of African-descended Muslims in the Middle East has expanded dramatically in the past two decades, no study documents the religious practices of the African-descended Muslims in the Jordan Valley. This initial inquiry into the role of race and religion in the lives of the Jordanian Ghawarna, or the people of the Jordan Valley, explores the complicated meanings and functions of blackness and Islam among both men and women in a contemporary Middle Eastern setting. It reviews various theories about the origins of those Ghawarna who are of African descent, charts the effects of racism on their lives, and outlines the ways in which Ghawarna, African-descended and not, celebrate Ramadan, conduct wedding parties, and ward off the evil eye. The findings, based on the original interviews conducted largely with residents in the towns of Ghor al-Mazra‘a and Ghor as-Safi, suggest the usefulness of further inquiry into both rural Islamic practice and racialization in Jordan.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the American Center of Oriental Reseach (ACOR), Barbara Porter, Jean Bradbury, Hani Elayyan, Sarah Harpending, Nofeh Nawasra, Ana Silkatcheva, Rabee’ Zureikat, and many others who remain anonymous, especially residents of the Jordan Valley.
Notes
1Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 1990).
2Terence Walz and Kenneth M Cuno (eds), Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (American University of Cairo Press, New York, NY 2010); Behnaz A Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana and Paul E Lovejoy (eds), Slavery, Islam, and Diaspora (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ 2009); Ehud R Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 2007); Paul E Lovejoy (ed), Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Markus Weiner, Princeton, NJ 2004); Eve Trout Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2003); John Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Markus Weiner, Princeton, NJ 2002).
3Hishaam Aidi, ‘Slavery, Genocide, and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New Racial Olympics’ (Spring 2005) Middle East Report 35 <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer234/slavery-genocide-politics-outrage> accessed 4 July 2011. For an early argument against the bifurcation of African and Muslim, see Edward W Blyden, ‘Islam in the Western Soudan’ (1902) 2 J African Soc 21, 24, 33.
4Eve M Trout-Powell, ‘Will the Subaltern Ever Speak? Finding African Slaves in the Historiography of the Middle East’ in Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer and Y Hakam Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA 2006) 253.
5Thomas Tweed defines religions as “confluences of organic–cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries”; Thomas A Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2006) 54.
6Since 2000, full-length articles focused on Islam or Muslims in Jordan appearing in International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) have included Quintan Wiktorowicz, ‘The Salafi Movement in Jordan’ (2000) 32(2) IJMES 219–40; and Janine A Clark, ‘The Conditions of Islamist Moderation: Unpacking Cross-Ideological Cooperation in Jordan’ (2006) 38(4) IJMES 539–60. These articles reflect a much larger trend in academic books. A supermajority of all Arabic and English language books about Islam in Jordan held by the Library of Congress covers political Islam.
7Andrew Shryock calls the Ghawarna people an “Afro-Arab” population; Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 1997) 136. But some Ghawarna may not have black roots, e.g. the Ghawarna of the Galilee in Israel do not appear to be African, according to Dan Rabinowitz in e-mail correspondence with author, 27 June 2011. On the Israeli Ghawarna, see further Sliman Khawalde and Dan Rabinowitz, ‘Race from the Bottom of the Tribe That Never Was: Segmentary Narratives Amongst the Ghawarna of Galilee’ (2002) 58 J Anthropological Res 225–43.
8Jum'a Mahmoud H Kareem, The Settlement Patterns in the Jordan Valley in the Mid- to Late Islamic Period (Archaeopress, Oxford 2000) 11; Bethany J Walker, ‘The Role of Agriculture in Mamluk–Jordanian Power Relations’ (2008) 57(Suppl.) Bull d'Etudes Orientales 82, 84 <beo.revues.org/160?file = 1> accessed 15 July 2011; WF Albright, ‘The Archaeological Results of an Expedition to Moab and the Dead Sea’ (1924) 14 Bull Am Schools Oriental Res 2–12.
9Linda L Layne, ‘The Production and Reproduction of Tribal Identity in Jordan’ (PhD thesis, Princeton University 1986) 86–7, 309–11. Also John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (John Murray, London 1822) 388; Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1982) 39; and Ammon Cohen and Bernard Lewis, Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine in the Sixteenth Century (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1978) 56–9.
10For example, Shryock (n 7) 45, 158–9.
11Layne (n 9) 311–12; Toledano (n 9) 29–30, 64.
12William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 2006) 116; Linda L Layne, Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1994) 51 n 29.
13Peter Gubser, Politics and Change in Al-Karak, Jordan: A Study of a Small Arab Town and Its District (Oxford University Press, London 1973) 65–7.
14Sheikh Raslan Ahmad M El-Kayed Bani Yasin, ‘A Critical and Comparative Study of the Dialectical Speech of the Ghawarna Community in the Jordan Valley in Jordan’ (PhD thesis, University of Leeds 1980). One of my informants from the village of Ghor as-Safi told me that her father-in-law, a Palestinian, and her mother-in-law, an Egyptian, were still referred to as ajnabī, or foreign, despite having lived in the Jordan Valley for decades; interview with the author, 5 June 2011.
15Layne (n 9) 83–8, 318–20.
16Raphael Patai, The Kingdom of Jordan (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1958) 81. Patai also argued that “racial prejudice is largely absent” and that black people were “accepted as social equals,” a claim contradicted by almost every other scholarly account.
17Emad Ahmed Helal, ‘Muhammad Ali's First Army: The Experiment in Building an Entirely Slave Army’ in Terence Walz and Kenneth M Cuno (eds), Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (American University of Cairo Press, New York, NY 2010) 17–42; Susan Beckerleg, ‘African Bedouin in Palestine’ (2007) 6 Asian Afr Stud 290–1; Dzouyi Therese Konanga-Nicolas, ‘The African Palestinian Community in the Old City of Jerusalem’ (August 2007) This Week in Palestine 112 <http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=2215&ed=144&edid=144>.
18I have been gathering information about race, color, and prejudice in Jordan since first studying Arabic at Yarmouk University in Irbid during the summer of 1995. Since then I have visited Jordan several times, operated four study abroad programs there, and spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Amman in 2009–10. From May to June 2011, I formally interviewed 18 adults about race and religion in the Jordan Valley. Some interviews were conducted entirely in Arabic, while others were conducted using a mix of Arabic and English.
19For helpful definitions of institutionalized racism and racialization, see Michael O Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 2000) 7–17; and Thomas M Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford, New York, NY 2004) 1–18.
20George M Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 2002) 17–47.
21Winthrop D Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (W.W. Norton, New York, NY 1977).
22George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (Armstrong & Son, New York, NY 1894) 183.
23Salem R Yasin, Mawieh M Hamad, Ali Z Elkarmi and Adnan S Jaran, ‘African Jordanian Population Genetic Database on Fifteen Tandem Repeat Genetic Loci’ (2005) 46(4) Croatian Med J 590.
24Thomas L Thompson, ‘Hidden Histories and the Problem of Ethnicity in Palestine’ in Michael Pior (ed), Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine (Melisende, London 1998) 32.
25Mervat Hatem, ‘Africa on My Mind’ (2009) 41 IJMES 189–92.
26For example, Dusé Mohamed Ali, In the Land of the Pharaohs: A Short History of Egypt from the Fall of the Ismail to the Assassination of Boutros Pasha (Stanley Paul, London 1911); and Ali's journal, African Times and Orient Review. Also Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (eds), AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York University Press, New York, NY 2006).
27Beckerleg (n 17) 291.
28Cf. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1992).
29Beckerleg (n 17) 301.
30Shryock (n 7) 136.
31‘About Ghor al-Mazra'a’ Zikra Initiative webpage <http://www.zikrainitiative.org/#/page5>.
32Gubser (n 13) 28, 65.
33Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (2nd edn, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN 2003).
34Edward E Curtis IV, ‘African American Islamization Reconsidered: Black History Narratives and Muslim Identity’ (2005) 73(2) J Am Acad Religion 659–84.
35Zureikat is founder of the Zikra Initiative, an organization whose purpose is to bring urban Jordanians together with residents of Ghor al-Mazra‘a to “engage, interact, and exchange resources.” Its programs focus on arts and crafts, health and well-being, and eco-tourism.
36Beckerleg (n 17) 293–4, 299. Only a few of Beckerleg's informants invoked memories of slave markets and thought that their ancestors might have come from the Sudan or Ethiopia.
37As of 2004, the population of Ghor as-Safi was approximately 17,000; <http://www.citypopulation.de/Jordan.html> accessed 25 July 2011.
38Robin DG Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, New York, NY 1994) 9–10.
39Ph Marçais, ‘Ayn’ in Encyclopedia of Islam (CD-ROM v 1.0, Brill, Leiden 1999); ‘Concise Manual for the Use of the Holy Koran against Magic and Sorcery’ in Gerda Sengers, Women and Demons: Cult Healing in Islamic Egypt (Brill, Leiden 2003) 254–73; Bess Allen Donaldson, The Wild Rue: A Study of Muhammadan Magic and Folklore in Iran (Luzac, London 1938) 13–23.
40Brian Spooner, ‘The Evil Eye in the Middle East’ in Mary Douglas (ed), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (Tavistock, London 1970) 311–19.
41For discussions of gender and healing in various Muslim communities, cf. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, In Amma's Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South Asia (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA 2006); Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI 1989); and Sengers (n 39).
42Bani Yasin (n 14) 47. See further Hilma Granqvist's many photographs of shrine visitation in 1920s Palestine in Karen Seger (ed), Portrait of Palestinian Village: The Photographs of Hilma Granqvist (Third World Centre for Research and Publishing, London 1981) 150–4.
43Dawoud El Alami, The Marriage Contract in Islamic Law (Graham & Trotman, London 1992); cf. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law: Iran and Morocco Compared (I.B. Tauris, London 1993).
44Mauro van Aken, ‘Dancing Belonging: Contesting Dabkeh in the Jordan Valley, Jordan’ (2006) 32(2) J Ethnic Migration Stud 204. Also Mauro van Aken, Facing Home: Palestinian Belonging in a Valley of Doubt (Shaker, Maastricht 2003).
45Van Aken (n 44), ‘Dancing Belonging’ 211.
46Mauro van Aken, e-mail correspondence with the author, 17 May 2011.
47Van Aken (n 44), ‘Dancing Belonging’ 211.
48Ibid. 213–15.
49Ibid. 217.
50Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY 2004) 236–41; John O Voll, ‘Reconceptualizing “Regions” in “Area Studies”’ (2009) 4(2) IJMES 196–7; Terence Walz, ‘The Fruit of the Africanist Contribution’ (2009) 41(2) IJMES 198–202.
51Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2007) 37.